By Elias GrollElias Groll is an assistant editor at Foreign Policy. A native of Stockholm, Sweden, he received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University, where he was the managing editor of The Harvard Crimson.

With the White House selling an increasingly skeptical Congress and public on airstrikes in Syria, President Obama and his lieutenants have rolled out just about every possible argument to marshal support on the Hill ahead of Obama’s big Syria speech on Tuesday evening. It’s akin to throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Is Syria’s use of chemical weapons a threat to U.S. national security? You bet, says National Security Advisor Susan Rice. Does the United States have a moral obligation to enforce international norms against chemical weapons use? It certainly does, says White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough. Does the current crisis bear a frightening resemblance to Munich circa 1938? Most certainly, says Secretary of State John Kerry. And is there a need to send a strong message to the mullahs in Tehran about their nuclear ambitions? Damn straight, says U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power.

Welcome to the spaghettification of U.S. foreign policy.

A case in point: the appearance Sunday of McDonough, the White House chief of staff, on NBC’s Meet the Press. First McDonough noted that Congress’s decision on Syria "will be listened to very clearly in Damascus, but not just in the Damascus — also in Tehran … and among Lebanese Hezbollah." Three questions later, the proposal for strikes was all about the importance of discouraging chemical weapons use. "This is a targeted, limited consequential action to reinforce this prohibition against these weapons that unless we reinforce this prohibition, will proliferate and threaten our friends and our allies." Lest the administration be accused of short-sightedness, McDonough was quick to emphasize that strikes would hasten the arrival of a long-term solution to the conflict. "And our effort to target this effectively will only help that political diplomatic resolution."

Got all that? To recap, a limited U.S. military engagement will prevent the use of chemical weapons elsewhere, encourage a political resolution to the conflict, and discourage Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

But wait, that’s not all. "Israel is at risk, Jordan is at risk, Turkey is at risk, the region is at risk," Kerry proclaimed on Meet the Press the prior week. Then, on Saturday, Kerry went so far as to say that "this is our Munich moment" — a reference to the 1938 deal in Munich that ceded parts of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany in an attempt to avoid war. According to the White House, however, these risks aren’t limited to bloodshed inside Syria. An unpunished Assad regime, Rice, the national security advisor, argued on Monday, puts "Americans at risk of chemical attacks, targeted at our soldiers and diplomats in the region and potentially our citizens at home" (McDonough made a similar point on the Sunday talk shows).

Not only is the White House raising the specter of the Holocaust, it is also warning that Assad’s chemical weapons use threatens the U.S. homeland.

The administration’s case has evolved significantly since John Kerry first sketched out the rationale for carrying out a punitive strike on Syria in humanitarian terms. "What we saw in Syria last week should shock the conscience of the world," Kerry said on Aug. 26. "It defies any code of morality. Let me be clear. The indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the killing of women and children and innocent bystanders by chemical weapons is a moral obscenity. By any standard, it is inexcusable." That moral outrage remains — as when Rice said Monday that "as a parent I cannot look at those pictures, those little children laying on the ground … and not think of my own two kids" — but in selling the argument to an unconvinced Congress, every argument possible has gotten tacked on as well.

The White House, of course, would contend that, taken together, all these arguments add up to a compelling case for intervening militarily in Syria. Its critics would contend that they are emblematic of a muddled rationale for war. Perhaps by Tuesday, when Obama addresses the nation he hopes to once more lead into conflict, the White House will have thrown enough spaghetti against the wall to have found an argument that sticks.

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Yochi Dreazen is a Managing Editor for News at Foreign Policy. He is also writer-in-residence at the Center for a New American Security. His book about military suicide was published by Random House's Crown division in 2014.

Prior to joining Foreign Policy, Dreazen was a contributing editor at the Atlantic and the senior national security correspondent for National Journal. He began his career at the Wall Street Journal and spent 11 years at the newspaper, most recently as its military correspondent. He was born in Chicago, and later attended the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, he edited the award-winning daily campus newspaper and graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1999 with degrees in History and English. He was hired by the Wall Street Journal immediately after graduation. Dreazen arrived in Iraq in April 2003 with the Fourth Infantry Division, and spent the next two years living in Baghdad as the Wall Street Journal's main Iraq correspondent.

Dreazen has made more than 12 lengthy trips to Iraq and Afghanistan and has spent a total of nearly four years on the ground in the two countries, mostly doing front-line combat embeds. He has reported from more than 20 countries, including Pakistan, Russia, China, Israel, Japan, Turkey, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia.

In 2010, Dreazen received the Military Reporters & Editors association’s top award for domestic military reporting in a large publication for a series of articles about military suicide and the psychological traumas impacting veterans of the two long wars. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Smithsonian, Tablet and the New Republic and he appears regularly on TV and radio programs such as NPR's Diane Rehm Show and PBS' Washington Week with Gwen Ifill. Dreazen gives frequent lectures about journalism, the wars and current events to both civilian and military audiences.

Dreazen lives in Washington with his wife, Annie Rosenzweig Dreazen, and their beloved Golden Retriever, Charlie.

Gordon Lubold is a national security reporter for Foreign Policy. He is also the author of FP's Situation Report, an e-mailed newsletter that is blasted out to more than 70,000 national security and foreign affairs subscribers each morning that includes the top nat-sec news, breaking news, tidbits, nuggets and what he likes to call "candy." Before arriving at FP, he was a senior advisor at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, where he wrote on national security and foreign policy. Prior to his arrival at USIP, he was a defense reporter for Politico, where he launched the popular Morning Defense early morning blog and tip-sheet. Prior to that, he was the Pentagon and national security correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, and before that he was the Pentagon correspondent for the Army Times chain of newspapers. He has covered conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries in South Asia, and has reported on military matters in sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and Latin America as well as at American military bases across the country. He has spoken frequently on the sometimes-contentious relationship between the military and the media as a guest on numerous panels. He also appears on radio and television, including on CNN, public radio's Diane Rehm and To the Point, and C-SPAN's Washington Journal. He lives in Alexandria with his wife and two children.